Thoughts on rationalism and the rationalist community from a skeptical perspective. The author rejects rationality in the sense that he believes it isn't a logically coherent concept, that the larger rationalism community is insufficiently critical of it's beliefs and that ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY IS NOT THE TRUE CALIF.

Social Sciences

TruePath3rd March 2018

Misleading Reporting and Dubious Statistics

So the following letter is being widely reported online as if it is evidence for the importance of gun control. I’m skeptical of the results as I detail in the next post but even if one takes the results at face value the letter is pretty misleading and the media reporting is nigh fraudulent.

In particular if one digs into the appendix to the letter one finds the following statement: “many of the firearm injuries observed in the commercially insured patient population may reflect non-crime-related firearm injuries.” This is unsurprising as using health insurance data means you are only looking at patients rich enough to be insured and willing to report their injury as firearms related: so basically excluding anyone injured in the commission of a crime or who isn’t legally allowed to use a gun. As a result they also analyzed differences in crime rates and found no effect.

So even on it’s face this study would merely show that people who choose to use firearms are sometimes injured in that use. That might be a good reason to stay away from firearms yourself but not additional reason for regulation as is being suggested in the media.

Moreover, if the effect is really just about safety at gun ranges then its unclear if the effect is from lower use of such ranges or that the NRA conference encourages greater care and best practices.

Reasons To Suspect The Underlying Study

Also, I’m pretty skeptical of the underlying claim in the study. The size of the effect claimed is huge relative to the number of people who attend an NRA conference. I mean about 40% of US households are gun owners but only ~80,000 people attend nationwide NRA conventions or ~.025% of the US population or ~.0625 of US gun owners. Thus, for this statistic to be true because NRA members are busy at the conference we would have to believe NRA conference attendees were a whopping 320 times more likely to be inflict a gun related injury than the average gun owner.

Now if we restrict our attention to homicides this is almost surely not the case. Attending an NRA convention requires a certain level of financial wealth and political engagement which suggests membership in a socioeconomic class less likely to commit gun violence and than the average gun owner. And indeed, the study finds no effect in terms of gun related crime. Even if we look to non-homicides gun deaths from suicides far outweigh those from accidents and I doubt those who go to an NRA convention are really that much more suicidal inclined.

An alternative likely explanation is that the NRA schedules its conferences for certain times of the year when people are likely to be able to attend and we are merely seeing seasonal correlations masquerading as effects from the NRA conference (a factor they don’t control for). Also as they run all subgroup analysises and don’t report the results for census tracks and other possible subgroups the possibility for p-hacking is quite real. Looking at the graph they provide I’m not exactly overwhelmed.

The claim gets harder to believe when one considers the fact that people who attend NRA meetings almost surely don’t give up going to firing ranges during the meeting. Indeed, I would expect (though haven’t been able to verify) that there would be any number of shooting range expeditions during the conference and that this would actually mean many attendees would be more likely to handle a gun during that time period.

Though, once one realizes that the data set one is considering is only those who make insurance claims relating to gun related injuries it is slightly more plausible but only at the cost of undermining the significance of the claim. Deaths and suicides are much less likely to produce insurance claims and the policy implications aren’t very clear if all we are seeing is a reduction in people injured because of incorrect gun grips (see the mythbusters about this..such injuries can be quite serious).